The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has cast the principal players for this summer’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and also announced that after the show’s Boulder run, “R&J” will play two nights in the Arvada Center’s outdoor amphitheater, Aug. 19-20.
Playing the fated lovers will be Benjamin Bonenfant and Jamie Ann Romero. Juliet’s nurse will be played by Leslie O’Carroll. The rest of the cast has not yet been announced.

“Romeo and Juliet,” to be presented in full Renaissance costuming, opens June 25 in the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Mary Rippon Amphitheatre.

The season also includes “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Inspector General” (indoors), and “The Little Prince” (indoors).

The Arvada Center launched its outdoor CenterFest series last summer, including theater, pop and chamber music. The Boulder Bach Festival will provide opening entertainment before both “R&J” performances. Tickets go on sale at a later date, when the Arvada Center releases its entire CenterFest summer schedule.

Colorado Shakes artistic director Philip Sneed made his Arvada Center debut directing the current “The Lion in Winter,” featuring many of his regular actors. Bonenfant, for example, is playing the young French King Philip. It runs through tomorrow, Feb. 20.

For more information on “The Lion in Winter,” call 303-898-7200 or go to arvadacenter.org.

Yes yes yes! I absolutely love their choices for this years cast. I was getting some help from my Denver locksmith when he told me about this. I was so happy when he told me! Got to love a good cast for any Shakespeare play!

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.